


Never Yours (Always His)

by Imoshen



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: A/B/O Universe, AU, Alpha Booker, BAMF Nicky, Beta Joe, Booker is an idiot in this, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Omega Nicky, kinkmeme fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:08:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27069865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imoshen/pseuds/Imoshen
Summary: Omega Nicky chose Beta Joe as his mate. Unusual? Yes, but it works and they are happy with each other. Nicky does not need or want an Alpha.Alpha Booker doesn't agree. He betrays them over it.This is how Nicky (and Joe) react.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 29
Kudos: 386





	Never Yours (Always His)

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this prompt](https://theoldguardkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/5194.html?thread=1702474&posted=1#cmt1718346):  
> Joe and Nicky are together and bonded. They've had some issues, as it's not generally accepted for an omega to bond to a beta, and not an alpha. Joe and Nicky don't care, though. They're as together as they love each other and ignore the naysayers.  
> Joe uses knotting dildos with Nicky when he needs to, and Joe is the only one who sees Nicky through his heats.  
> The issue starts when Booker joins the team. He finds it offensive that an omega is bonded to a beta, and thinks Nicky should be with him instead of Joe (also not going to happen). He tries to push Nicky into fucking him (Nicky would never) and break Nicky's bond with Joe.  
> Nicky has no intention of ever fucking Booker and has no desire to be bonded to anyone but Joe.  
> At the lab, Booker claims that he would never have betrayed them if Nicky had been a proper omega and bonded with Booker, instead of staying with Joe.  
> What's the fallout from this?  
> Again, please do not have Booker join Joe and Nicky. This is not a threesome, Joe and Nicky want no one but each other.

The words drop into the room like a bombshell.

“Yeah well, if Nicky had been a proper Omega and let me claim him the way he should’ve, we wouldn’t be here!”

For a second, Nicky thinks someone shot him, or maybe the insane scientist started another of her tests. His lungs don’t seem to function as intended, because he can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything but lie there and stare at the Alpha strapped down on Andy’s other side.

Joe makes a noise Nicky hasn’t heard from him in a long, long time – a wordless sound of rage, primitive and powerful. He yanks on his restraints, and Nicky is absolutely certain that if he was free – or if he got free, somehow, right now – he would tear Booker limb from limb, not necessarily with his saif.

It wakes Nicky up rather effectively, too. Rage bubbles up from deep in his soul, but now is not the time nor the place, and he needs to calm Joe down before the man hurts himself trying to get to Booker. It would heal, of course it would, but Nicky will not have Joe hurt for a single second because of _Booker_ if he can prevent it.

“Shhh, Yusuf, calm yourself,” he says, turning onto his side as far as he can, turning towards Joe. He wishes he could tuck Joe’s face into his neck, soothe him with his touch and scent, but his voice will have to do. He slips into the mix of Ligurian and Arabic they spoke at the very start, old and familiar and hopefully enough to call Joe back to him. “You are my mate,” he tells Joe, holds those wide, angry eyes when Joe finally looks at him. “I neither want nor need anyone else. Hush, my darling. Now is not the time.”

For a moment, he thinks it useless because Joe stares at him, but he keeps pulling against his restraints and his eyes are still so wide and angry. “Please,” he whispers, and that seems to do the trick: Joe breathes deep, and slumps. Nicky breathes a sigh of relief and keeps his gaze on Joe, ignores Booker’s ranting and Andy’s stony silence and all the implications. His priority is Joe, has always been since the day their hands met on the sands of a far-away land, and nothing will change that.

This is not the first knotheaded Alpha to make disparaging remarks about an Omega mating a Beta, and Nicky knows it won’t be the last. They’ve weathered them all, proven them all wrong – Joe is all Nicky has ever needed, ever wanted. Modern amenities make it easier, yes, and he loves it when Joe uses toys to mimic a knot and fucks him silly… but it isn't needed. They’ve made do for centuries before those were an option, and Nicky hasn’t gone unsatisfied a single heat since Joe’s fingers closed around his, that long-ago day.

No, Booker isn't the first to make unwelcome remarks and advances because Nicky chose a Beta as his mate. He just is the first they trusted to have their backs, despite this having been an issue from the start. He’d never let them down when it counted – or so Nicky thought. Now, he wants to call everything into question, and that hurts in a way no stupid remark about who he chose as a mate ever could.

Nicky tucks his own anger down deep and holds Joe’s gaze, watches him breathe. Finally, Joe gives him a tiny smile, and Nicky smiles back as his world rights itself.

Nile rescues them, because of course she does. This woman with her young heart and old eyes, who still has ideals she clings to and who will be a fresh breath of air to all of them, stuck as they have been in their ways. Nile, who challenges Andy in a way none of them have done in centuries – Joe and Nicky because they know Andy’s grief and still feel the need to shield her in whatever small ways she will let them, Booker because he doesn’t have the balls.

Their escape is a dance of bullets and blood and death, and Nicky’s only regrets are the pain in Joe’s eyes where he hovers over Nicky when he gasps back to life, a mocking halo of his own blood around his head, and that he isn't the one to end the rotten bastard who thought he could use them as lab mice. He is a barrier between Joe and Booker in the car, because he knows his beloved – Joe’s anger is still burning high, and it is best if he can pretend Booker isn't there at all. Nicky himself deals with having the Alpha pressed to his side with gritted teeth and the dregs of his control. The clear line of sight he has through the windshield helps, as does the gun he’s still holding in one hand. He is not above ramming the muzzle into Booker’s leg whenever the man twitches as if he might want to start talking.

The uneasy truce holds, aided by their mutual desire to get as far away from Merrick Pharmaceuticals as humanly possible, as fast as humanly possible. It even holds all the way to one of their safehouses, out of the car and into the house itself.

It shatters when Nicky ignores Joe’s gesture towards the stairs and the waiting shower and walks through into the kitchen, because he wants a bottle of water _yesterday_ and the blood matting down his hair and drenching the back of his shirt will not get any worse for the five minutes he will take to drain said bottle – and Booker has the gall to snort and open his mouth.

“He can’t even treat you right in this,” he says, scorn dripping from every word. “No omega should keep walking around like… like that.”

Nicky stops dead in his tracks as the thin, thin strand of his patience snaps. The anger he’d stuffed into a mental corner back in the lab bubbles up again, and this time it’s not just anger. It’s all the little remarks Booker made over the years. It’s his shameless attempts to take Nicky to his bed, the constant unwelcome touches he ignored because he thought the damn Alpha would eventually tire of them. It’s all the remarks he made about Joe’s inadequacy, all the times he barged in on them as they were making love or just plain fucking.

It’s the pheromones he made a point to leave on Nicky’s clothes, more than once, just before a heat. As if Nicky didn’t know exactly who his mate was, and who he wanted in his bed. As if their bond might be broken by weak pheromones.

The rage bubbles forth, and on the heels of it wakes something old, something that rarely stirs these days. Nicky lets it wash over him, allows his heartbeat to pick up and his breath to slow in anticipation. He knows he’s grinning as he turns, and a part of him notices Nile stepping back, wide-eyed as she catches his expression. He notes Joe had advanced on Booker, who stands in the middle of the almost-empty room that once was the living room as if he has all the right to be there. He notes Andy just behind Joe, face pale and furious, and wonders if she was about to hold Joe back or help him.

It doesn’t matter.

This is Nicky’s show now, and by the God of his past, he will deliver.

Nile freezes when Nicky turns on his heel.

He’d been nothing but kind and gentle with her, that evening in Goussainville when she’d still been mostly shell-shocked by the abrupt change of her life, by the choices that had been taken from her and the ones she was facing now. She’d been reeling and alone even among those who were like her, those men and that woman who were so singularly able to understand her as nobody else in the world could, now.

It had been Nicky who’d asked about food intolerances when he made dinner, Nicky who showed her where she could sleep, Nicky who made sure she had a pillow and a sleeping bag and a goddamn toothbrush. He’d been intense, yes, but also… calm, and gentle. Sure, she’d since seen him kill his way through the hired guns at Merrick Pharmaceuticals, and he’d been quick and competent and unflinching from the violence – but this, this is something else.

The smile on his face is cold and shows far too many teeth, and his eyes are chips of blue-green ice. The blood spattered over his face just adds to the expression, and suddenly she has no problem at all, imagining him with a sword in his hand on an ancient battleground.

She steps back on instinct until her back hits the wall, and feels slightly vindicated when Joe and Andy do the same – though Joe does it far, far slower, and when his shoulders hit the wall, he leans back against it as if he might be watching a particularly interesting match of chess. Nile blinks at him, at his nonchalance, and then she sees his hands: clawed where they dig into the fabric of his shirt over his elbows. She understands. Joe’s nonchalance is a thin veneer, and he’s just as furious as Nicky looks to be, beneath it.

Booker, she notices when she looks at the Alpha, doesn’t seem to understand just how fucked he is.

“I have had it with your remarks and your frankly unwanted offers,” Nicky says, and his voice has gone cold in a way Nile instinctively knows is _wrong_. Nicky isn't supposed to sound like that – but it works. Her own hair wants to stand on end, and she isn't even in his focus. “You’ve been fucking insufferable about our relationship from the start. You think you know how I want to be treated? You think I can’t make those decisions by myself perfectly well?”

“It’s not your place,” Booker insists, and fuck he sounds obnoxious. Nile has heard the whole _it’s not your place_ shit before, though that wasn’t about her secondary gender but about being a woman who chose a soldier’s career. “An Omega should mate an Alpha who can take proper care of them. _Everywhere_.”

Nicky snorts, and his hands clench and unclench. “You think _you_ can leave me wet with a single glance, a single word?” he taunts. “I’ve got news for you, Sebastièn: your pheromones disgust me. You think you can satisfy me? You couldn’t even dream to actually claim me if I had a hand tied to my back the whole time.”

Booker draws himself up to his full height, all insulted Alpha, and growls. Nile presses herself more firmly against the wall. Booker charges Nicky, who sidesteps with an elegance Nile doesn’t think she’s seen before. He slams an elbow into Booker’s back as the Alpha passes him, and Nile winces. Booker grunts, and then he’s turning and charging again, and this time Nicky meets him head-on.

They’re angled so Nile can’t really see how he does it, but Nicky _throws_ Booker’s not-insubstantial weight over his shoulder in a smooth roll, tucks and comes up ready as Booker slams into the floor. He stretches and grins down at Booker, cold and cruel and entirely different from the Nicky Nile met before.

There’s a soft huff next to her, and Nile looks up and sees Joe – and he’s smiling. What the fuck.

A growl wrenches Nile’s attention back to the men in the middle of the room. Booker has gotten back onto his feet. He doesn’t stay there for long, Nicky’s fist breaking his nose with a solid crunching noise. Blood washes down over his mouth, and while the break itself heals fast, the blood remains. Nicky delicately shakes his hand out. “Had enough yet?” he asks, and when Booker wipes his mouth on his sleeve and snarls at him, laughs. “Guess not.”

Booker actually manages to grab Nicky’s arm this time, and Nile holds her breath because if Booker tries to get his teeth anywhere Nicky’s throat, she’s pretty sure Joe will lose it – but she soon sees she needn’t have worried.

Nicky uses Booker’s grip on his forearm to pull him in close, then drops him with a swift knee to the groin and a palm to the chin. Booker crashes into the wooden floor hard enough to rattle the furniture, making a high, pained noise, and Nicky follows him down with all the grace of a cat. His knee slams into Booker’s chest, and Nile just _knows_ he’s putting all his weight onto that point of contact. She thinks she can hear a rib or two break upon impact. Nicky pins Booker to the floor with that knee. There’s a sudden gleam of metal in his hand, and Booker _screams_.

Nile doesn’t flinch when she sees blood bloom on his jeans, between his legs. Nicky’s blade stills, and his hand in Booker’s hair pulls his head back until his throat is bared. Nicky’s voice is very, very quiet and very, very cold as he speaks.

“If I thought it would take, I would cut your fucking balls off and hang them on my wall,” he tells Booker, and twists his blade just a little. Booker makes another pained noise, his body twisting beneath Nicky involuntarily. “Hold _still_. See, I’ve done just that to other Alphas in the past who wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone, but you were family.”

Joe growls, soft and menacing. So does Andy. Nile swallows as she realizes just how deep this betrayal cut into these people. She remembers Andy’s determination to get Nicky and Joe back from Copley, remembers her pain and her exhaustion in that lab, and wonders how she could ever have thought Andy to be a heartless killing machine. She remembers the way Andy had said “They’d do the same for you” about two men who had met her for all of a few hours marching to a small war to free her if she’d been taken, with the conviction of someone who has the utmost confidence in her word, and wonders how the fuck Booker could betray these people after two centuries of that kind of trust.

“I will say this once, and I expect you to listen well,” Nicky continues, still focused entirely on Booker. “I am not yours to court, and I never will be. I make my own choices in who I take to my bed, and you have never been and will never be on that list. Next time you even think about touching me, I will cut your balls off. Next time you do touch me, I will cut your pathetic prick off along with them. And then I will sit back and watch my Yusuf have fun with you, _capisci_?”

Booker barely manages to nod with how tight Nicky must be holding his hair, but it seems to be enough. Nicky’s grin widens. “Good boy,” he drawls, and then his blade is gone from between Booker’s legs and buried in his chest before Nile can do so much as blink. Booker chokes, but Nicky has already released him, walked over him as if he’s meaningless.

Joe pushes off the wall and holds out both arms, and Nicky goes to him as if drawn on strings. Nile almost looks away from their kiss because it feels so… intimate, but she can’t. Because the feral, cold Nicky who just threatened to castrate Booker cups Joe’s face between his hands as if the other man is something fragile, something to be treated with reverence. Her heart aches, suddenly, with a yearning to find something similar. She wonders how Booker ever thought he could compete with this, because it’s more than obvious to her that these two were meant to be, two halves of a whole. She swallows and looks away as Nicky’s eyes drift closed. Andy meets her gaze with a wry smile and a softness to her eyes Nile hasn’t seen before. She jerks her head to the doorway, and Nile nods and follows her, stepping over Booker where he’s still pinned to the floor by Nicky’s blade.

She doesn’t look down at him.

He hasn’t kissed Joe since that armored van, which is at least part of the reason why Nicky is reluctant to part from his mate – they don’t constantly seek each other’s touch, but they’ve both been badly rattled by their recent stint as lab mice. Joe’s kiss gentles him, soothes the bloodthirsty creature living beneath Nicky’s skin until it’s almost dormant again. Nicky sighs into their kiss, offers a sweet little purr that Joe answers with a deeper rumble. They could keep going like this, leaning into each other and lost in the gentle slide of lips and tongue... but then Booker groans as he revives, and Nicky is reminded he’s still parched. Joe growls a little as he pulls back, and Nicky darts back in to nip at his lower lip, lick over the small hurt just to hear the hitch in Joe’s breath. “Go start the shower,” he murmurs, not quite ready to let go of his mate just yet. His thumbs stroke along the line of Joe’s beard along his cheeks. “I’ll bring water and see if there’s anything we can snack on.”

Joe’s eyes flicker over Nicky’s shoulder, but he doesn’t ask if Nicky is sure. Joe knows exactly how well Nicky can and will take care of himself, has never doubted his ability to put everyone in their place. No, this is Joe wanting his own pound of flesh, his rage not quite as quenched as Nicky’s. Nicky distracts him with another kiss, slow and just a little filthy. “Later,” he whispers into the space between their lips, and Joe sighs and nods and releases Nicky from the circle of his arms.

Nicky ignores Booker, still pinned to the floor by the blade through his heart. He’ll get it out eventually, or he won’t. Andy might even help with that if she’s feeling generous. It was originally her blade, before Nicky borrowed it and forgot to give it back. They do that, she still has one of his guns hidden somewhere.

The safehouse might be a shell of a house, most of the furniture stashed away because they haven’t been here in too long, but the water pressure is still good. Nicky steps into the upper floor bathroom and into a cloud of steam, greeted by the sight of Joe stripping out of his shirt. Even beneath the less-than-flattering light, it’s a sight that makes Nicky’s heart beat faster and has his hands itch to touch and stroke all that soft skin Joe’s putting on display.

The need to get clean wins out by a hair’s breadth. Nicky strips his ruined clothes off and throws them on top of Joe’s – they’ll probably end up burning them later – and the hot water is bliss on his skin when he steps into the shower. Muscles he hadn’t even noticed were still unhappy and tense finally uncoil even as the water runs down his body in red-tinted rivulets. He reaches for the soap as Joe joins him beneath the spray, and then it’s the familiar dance of running soapy hands over their skin and passing the position directly beneath the spray back and forth as needed. Nicky washes his hair twice before he feels as if he got all the blood out.

Joe is quiet as they clean up, and he is quiet as they towel dry and crawl into the bed they’ve claimed. Nicky nudges him into the corner and wraps them in their blankets, and because it’s better if they don’t let this fester, he sits down in front of his mate and sucks in a deep breath. “We’re going to talk about this, right now,” he says.

Joe’s eyes widen before he slumps, reaches up to rub at his forehead. “It’s stupid, I know,” he mumbles. “Please don’t kick me.”

“If you’re actually considering that I could miss anything, being with you, I might have to,” Nicky says flatly. “Talk to me, Yusuf. We’ve heard all that shit, and worse, before.”

Joe growls softly at the reminder and reaches out, tugs Nicky into his lap. Nicky goes willingly, drapes himself over Joe and basks in his scent. It’s not as strong as an Alpha’s, but it’s familiar and soothing, and Nicky knows Joe’s thoughts have run along the same vein when his mate sucks in a deep breath, nostrils flaring as he scents him. “How did it get so out of hand?” Joe finally asks, his big hands warm on Nicky’s back and side. “He… fuck, Nicolò, what did I _miss_?”

“I have no idea,” Nicky admits, because he doesn’t. He did notice the jealousy, and Booker’s constant attempts to undermine his mating to Joe, but he didn’t notice how badly the man was slipping, either. “I probably let it slide too long.”

Joe tenses a little in his arms, mouth twisting into a flat, unhappy line. He doesn’t look at Nicky, and his next question explains perfectly well why he’s staring at Nicky’s collarbones instead of meeting his eyes. “Why did you?” he asks, and even his voice manages to be miserable. “Nico… I _know_ you said you don’t miss anything but… you’d tell me if there was something you did miss, right? That wasn’t just because it was Booker you were rejecting?”

Nicky doesn’t snap, because he can tell his mate is well and truly torn up over that thought. He mentally kicks himself for the decision to ignore Booker’s unwanted advances. Joe had never let on how much it bothered him, but this… this is not a new concern. Nicky runs his fingers through Joe’s wet curls, smiling as they cling to his skin. “Amore mio,” he says slowly. “Sun of my days. I have not lied to you in all our years. There is nothing I could want that you cannot give me. I do not want anyone else, I do not need anyone else.”

Joe finally looks up, but his eyes are still sad. Nicky’s heart aches, because his mate should never look so mournful. “I cannot give you this,” Joe whispers, and his palm slides from Nicky’s hip to just below his navel, warm and heavy on his belly. Nicky covers it with his own, cups Joe’s cheek in his free hand because his mate is hurting and that is _not_ allowed. (He will kill Booker again for waking this deep vein of insecurity in his mate. Later. Possibly repeatedly.)

“I never missed it,” he says and lets Joe see the truth of it in his eyes. “In all our years, my love. It is not something I sacrificed to be with you. You do remember I was living in a monastery before.”

Joe nods, rubs his cheek against Nicky’s palm. “I know. But you like children.”

“I do,” Nicky agrees. “So do you. But raising our own, among all the blades and the guns we forget to put away properly? That is not a nightmare I am prepared for, my heart.”

Joe huffs a laugh and his hand moves away from its spot below Nicky’s navel, cups the back of his neck instead. “I’m still so damn angry with him,” he whispers. “He actually sold us out, twice. Three times, if you count leading Andy into that ambush. We would’ve spent months in that shithole, at the least, if Nile hadn’t shown up.”

“I wanted to tear his throat out,” Nicky says conversationally, because there is nothing he can say to that, no reassurance he can offer. He knows Joe is right, and he doesn’t want to think about it too much. The nightmares will come, anyway. “I still want to, honestly.”

Joe’s hands tighten a little on him, and just like that, the mood between them shifts. His mate hums and turns his head to kiss his palm, his beautiful eyes dark for another reason now. “You’re so damn hot when you kick ass.”

“Am I now,” Nicky asks, smiling. They’ve had _this_ conversation before, multiple times, and he knows where it will lead. “Would you like another demonstration?”

“No,” Joe informs him, and then he’s tipping over backwards, goes sprawling on the bed. Joe is over him immediately, heavy and warm and welcome. Nicky pulls him down into a kiss and wraps his legs around his waist and allows himself to get lost in Joe’s touch, his kiss, his scent.

It’s not a permanent fix, he knows that even as he arches into the heat of the mouth kissing down his chest. They’ll revisit this topic again, and there will be tears and anger to work through. But for tonight, they can let it rest, can remind each other they are free, are whole.

Nothing is going to change that.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos make an author's day <3


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